WSO2 – A story of success

May 27, 2016

An introduction to WSO2

At Ribbonfish we have been working on a project with our client Macmillan that involves using WSO2. For those of you who have not heard of WSO2; this is an open-source middleware platform that allows businesses to work across private, public and hybrid clouds without the architectural time and expertise needed to connect the platforms.

The Problem

Our client Macmillan Publishers had the dilemma of “Point to Point integration vs. ESB” a few weeks ago. As some of us may know already ESB is one of the most complex, expensive and difficult solutions to develop, configure and maintain.

Although we didn’t have much experience in developing WSO2 before, we convinced Macmillan to trust us in delivering a proof of concept on WSO2 in order to decommission Onyx from their system, which was the core to many applications through web services, file exchange and direct database access for years. They were so impressed with the end result they went ahead and chose it as their overall ESB.

The Solution

The reasons why Macmillan was so impressed with WSO2 were simple; within a four week timeframe and no prior experience with the platform, we managed to deliver a WS02 instance in the cloud using a Linux box on the Azure platform to install the WSO2 software in no longer than 2 days and now have a free ESB running in the cloud. We managed to pass-through proxies to Onyx using only 12 lines of XML code. We could have made the transition directly, however that would have been a very time-consuming and complicated task, so we used WSO2 connect all their external applications to Salesforce and disconnect Onyx from their services. It is easy to see WSO2 as a bridge between Salesforce, the applications and Onyx.

We believe that WSO2 really is a game-changer because it reduces implementation time for integrating systems, which allows us to focus on delivering high-value solutions to our client much quicker whilst reducing costs due to the platform being open-sourced and free to use. It also provides a bird’s eye view of all your APIs whilst disconnecting back-end systems from front-end systems in days rather than months.